Fragments from Narnia – Part Seven: After Darkness, Light

Hubble snap a beautiful supernova explosion some 160,000 light-years from Earth
Hubble snap a beautiful supernova explosion some 160,000 light-years from Earth by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC-BY 2.0

“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”

Ephesians 2:8-9

“The White Witch? Who is she?”
“Why, it is she that has got all Narnia under her thumb. It’s she that makes it always winter. Always winter and never Christmas; think of that!”

C. S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

Articles in this Series

See the first article for the list.

After Darkness, Light

I must immediately confess that I have gone back to a previous passage. I originally intended to proceed through the text without skipping to and fro. I must also confess that the topic discussed in this article has very little to do with the Narnia quote. In other words, because it is Reformation Day, I have essentially highjacked this Narnia series to discuss Reformation doctrine, which hopefully will not cause too much distress. The only semblance I can draw between the Reformation and the quote above is that just as Christmas followed winter in Narnia, light followed darkness in the Reformation. Post tenebras lux is the Latin phrase for this; after darkness came light. The obvious dissimilarity is that Lewis intended for Christmas in Narnia to symbolise the consequences of Christ’s earthly ministry. So, the connection of this article to the Narnia quote may be extremely tenuous, but as the New Zealand saying goes, “she’ll be right”.1 My goal in this article is twofold: to briefly discuss Reformation doctrine and secondly, what the Reformation can teach about our times.

Justification by faith alone (sola fide) is called the material cause of the Reformation. This language, which borrows Aristotelian categories, refers to how sola fide was the stuff at the heart of the Reformation. Just as marble is the material cause of a Renaissance statue because it is the stuff out of which that statue is made, sola fide was the stuff that constituted the Reformation. Without it, you had no Reformation. Martin Luther called sola fide the “chief article”.3 John Calvin declared that it was the “principal ground on which religion must be supported”.4 Moving to contemporary times, R. C. Sproul proclaimed that “[w]ithout the doctrine of justification by faith alone, the gospel is not merely compromised, it is lost altogether”.5 J. I. Packer wonderfully articulates that “to declare and defend God’s justification publicly as the only way of life for any man was at once an act of confessing their [the Reformers’] faith, of glorifying their God by proclaiming his wonderful work, and of urging others to approach him in penitent and hopeful trust just as they did themselves”.6 Scripture alone (sola scriptura) was the formal principle of the Reformation, giving shape and form to the Reformers’ arguments.

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Fragments from Narnia – Part Six: On Grace and Truth

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“A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.”

Proverbs 25:11

“Well,” said Lucy rather slowly (for she wanted to be truthful and yet not to be too hard on [Mr. Tumnus]), “well, that was pretty bad. But you’re so sorry for it that I’m sure you will never do it again.”

C. S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

Articles in this Series

See the first article for the list.

On Grace and Truth

One great blessing of stories is that they incarnate virtue. Stories take propositional truths like obeying God and treasuring Him as first (Mk. 12:30-31) and flesh these truths out. They incarnate these truths in scenes like Peter and the apostles standing before the high priest and saying that their allegiance was first to God (Ac. 5:29). An application of this is that we should read the Biblical stories for their incarnation of virtue. However, we must distinguish between narrative and didactic portions of Scripture. This distinguishing must be done as not all things recorded in the narrative sections are morally correct, like David’s adultery with Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11). Hence, these sections, in some instances, obviously do not establish a normative standard for believers. The didactic portions teach this normative standard, like the Seventh Commandment, which says, “You shall not commit adultery.” (Ex 20:14). Therefore, we ought to read the narrative sections in light of the didactic sections: David committed evil. We must also read fictional books in light of the didactic sections of Scripture, with the crucial recognition that they, unlike the narrative portions of Scripture, are uninspired and, hence, susceptible to authorial error.

With that brief preface stated, I want to discuss what Lewis parenthetically noted about Lucy’s speech: “she wanted to be truthful and yet not too hard on [Tumnus]”. There is a particular balance or equilibrium that Lewis mentions here. Lucy desired to tell the truth about Tumnus as what the Faun did, namely planning to kidnap a child and give him or her to the White Witch, was “pretty bad”. But she was “not too hard” as she recognised Tumnus was upset and repentant. It would have been easy for Lucy to go to either extreme. There is a caveat here that one cannot be too truthful or too gracious, and the two are heavily interconnected as they both belong to God’s character and actions (Eph. 2:8-9; Heb. 6:18). So, when I speak of “either extreme”, it is really shorthand for saying that one prioritises an overly harsh and insensitive presentation of partial truth, or compromises by regarding peoples’ feelings more than their eternal destiny. I am not saying that it is impossible to simultaneously demonstrate truth and grace.

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Fragments from Narnia – Part Five: Always Winter and Never Christmas

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“Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.”

Ecclesiastes 1:2

“The White Witch? Who is she?”
“Why, it is she that has got all Narnia under her thumb. It’s she that makes it always winter. Always winter and never Christmas; think of that!”

C. S. Lewis, The Lion, THe Witch, and the Wardrobe

Articles in this Series

See the first article for the list.

Always Winter and Never Christmas

When Lucy asked Mr. Tumnus who the White Witch was, he answered with two intriguing statements. The first was that the White Witch had dominion over all of Narnia, and the second was that this dominion resulted in Narnia’s perpetual winter. Before we examine the Biblical undertones of these statements, we should consider the Narnian winter. Of course, this will be mainly conjecture, but we can imagine that it was not the benign winter that belongs to modern Christmastime, where children build snowmen, make snow angels, and go sledding.1 That is Aslan’s winter, not the White Witch’s winter. Aslan’s winter is a joyous occasion during which we celebrate that we have been counted white as snow (Is. 1:18).

Presumably, the Narnian winter was a frigid assailant, with chillingly sharp winds that pierced the Narnians’ core. Maybe it obscured visibility in a whirlwind of heavy snow, sometimes hailing so heavily that the younger, more restless Narnian creatures looked outside their houses in a mournful yearning and deep indignancy, accepting no comfort from their parents. Perhaps the winter attacked so bitterly and fiercely at times that Narnians often contracted lethal diseases. The eternally white landscape potentially became tiresome, something awfully dull and plain, causing the older Narnians to reminisce on the emerald verdancy and widespread cornucopia that once marked their lands. The idea of winter would not have been fun for the Narnians, unlike how it appears to those in countries who do not see much snow. Winter would have become a malevolent, oppressive, and tedious thing.

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Fragments from Narnia – Part Four: Service under the White Witch

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“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.”

Ephesians 2:1-3

“Like what I’ve done,” said the Faun. “Taken service under the White Witch. That’s what I am. I’m in the pay of the White Witch.”

C. S. Lewis, The Lion, THe Witch, and the Wardrobe

Articles in this Series

See the first article for the list.

Service under the White Witch

In our current cultural climate, freedom is valued as a kind of highest good. This valuing can be found in the feminist or LGBTQ cry for “reproductive freedoms” or “sexual liberation”, which includes abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism, abhorrence of traditional Christian views on gender and marriage, and so on. Another example is the Marxist cry for the proletariat to throw off their chains inflicted by capitalism and the unjust bourgeoise. Eastern religions teach freedom from the flow of life and ceaseless suffering as we are subsumed into Hinduism’s Brahma or Buddhism’s Nirvana. Secularists call for freedom from the restrictive bonds of religion and its allegedly toxic impact on families and society. Humans desire freedom. Contrarily, the Christian view is considered harsh, restrictive, Victorian, Puritanical, and a list of other pejoratives. Our culture claims that being a Christian is a stultifying, soul-crushing affair.

But the question, Biblically speaking, should not be whether we are enslaved to anyone or anything, but who or what we are enslaved to. The Apostle Paul presents only two alternatives: we are slaves to sin or slaves to righteousness (Rom. 6:15-23).1 Logically, this dichotomy means that there is no middle ground. There is no neutral space of agnosticism when approaching God. To be a slave to God means that we give our all to Him and that we pray “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt 6:10) not with an empty formality but with a deep desire to align our will more with His, and from then on to do His will. This notion of slavery is one that seems deeply repulsive, but really it is not one in which the slave’s identity is crushed under the domineering spirit of the master. Biblically, submission, servitude, or slavery to God is the opposite: it is one wherein our identity is found in Him and our service for Him. More on this later.

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Fragments from Narnia – Part Three: The Bad Faun

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“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”

Jeremiah 17:9

“I don’t think you’re a bad Faun at all,” said Lucy. “I think you are a very good Faun. You are the nicest Faun I’ve ever met.”
“Oh—oh—you wouldn’t say that if you knew,” replied Mr. Tumnus between his sobs. “No, I’m a bad Faun. I don’t suppose there ever was a worse Faun since the beginning of the world.”

C. S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

Articles in this Series

See the first article for the list.

The Bad Faun

To many, the Christian view of sin is repulsive. It is not fair, they reason, that we are born sinful. In fact, it is ludicrous that we are born sinful: we are all born in either a state of amorality, untouched by sin, like with Rosseau’s notion of the “noble savage”, or we are born with a potential to create our own meaning and engage in authentic existence, which is the existentialist notion, or we are to exercise our autonomous reason to act for the common good, which is the humanist notion. Or we are to engage in self-actualisation, connecting with the universe, acting in manifestation, as the New Age spirituality would claim. Or whatever they would claim. Whatever that means.

This optimistic view of humanity is found in Christianity. Pelagianism states that man without God’s grace can be saved. Semi-Pelagianism takes a step towards orthodoxy by saying that man is intrinsically sinful, but it still places some emphasis on the cooperation and initiative of man in salvation. Total depravity is the Biblical view that both Arminians (at least one-point Calvinists in this regard) and Calvinists affirm. The sole initiator in salvation is God. Of course, Arminians invoke prevenient grace and reject other flowery points, but it is neither the time nor the place to discuss this.

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